Die Washington Post, wohl alles andere als eine obskure Doomsday – Gazette sondern eher ein Haus – Organ der US - Finanzelite, kündigt in zwei Kolumnen den bevorstehenden Kräsch an. The Takeover Boom, About to Go Bust By Steven Pearlstein, Wednesday, June 13, 2007; Page D01 To understand why there's a credit bubble, how it's inflating the price of stocks and what it will mean for you when it bursts, let's consider the acquisition of Avaya, a large telecommunications equipment maker, announced last week by two private-equity firms, Texas Pacific Group and Silver Lake Partners. Avaya is expected to post revenue of about $5.4 billion this year. It has virtually no debt and has $825 million in the bank. Operating earnings -- profit before counting things like interest payments, taxes, depreciation and amortization -- are expected to reach $700 million. And if that's correct, it means the price being paid for Avaya, $8.2 billion, is 12 times operating profit, making it one of this season's richest deals. What's driving such high valuations is cheap debt, and plenty of it. We don't know yet how the all-cash purchase of Avaya will be financed, but if it follows the pattern of other recent buyouts, the new owners will take on at least $6 billion in debt. Given the junk-bond rating that has already been assigned to the deal, that is likely to work out to an average interest rate of about 8 percent, along with the obligation to pay back 1 percent of principal every year. Add it all together, and the new, improved Avaya will have to pay about $540 million more a year in debt service than it does now. Can the company handle that? Well, consider that only three years ago, Standard & Poor's calculated that operating profits for companies involved in leveraged buyouts were typically 3.4 times debt service. Last year, the number fell to 2.4. So far this year, it is 1.7. And the Avaya deal? It's 1.3 to 1, which, if you think about it, isn't much of a cushion if revenue suddenly falls or expenses rise more than expected. Nor would there be much cash left over for the company to increase its investment in research or pay for new plant and equipment. In other words, a deal like this would never get financed in normal times. Bank lenders and bondholders would demand that the new owners use more of their own money and take on less debt. Or they would demand interest rates so high that the company, as presently configured, wouldn't be able to generate enough cash to cover debt service. Either way, the buyers would never have agreed to pay $8.2 billion. But these are not normal times, and overpriced and over-leveraged deals like Avaya have been getting financed in record numbers. Back in 2004, about $275 billion in loans were issued for such highly leveraged transactions. By last year, that had risen to $490 billion. And in just the first five months of 2007, that record was broken. At some point sanity will be restored, triggered by any number of events. A high-profile acquisition could collapse because the new owners could not secure financing. Or a deal could blow up after it is discovered that there's really not enough cash to meet the debt payments. Or interest rates could suddenly rise from their current low level, threatening the viability of recently acquired companies and making it unlikely that the new owners will be able to sell for anything close to what they paid. In fact, over the past several weeks, all those things have begun to happen. On the bond market, yields on the benchmark 10-year Treasury bill have increased from just under 4.5 percent to more than 5.25 percent -- a three-quarters-of-a-point jump without any action by the Federal Reserve. And just last week, William Gross, one of the country's leading bond investors, recanted on his prediction that interest rates were headed down, warning instead that yields on 10-year Treasurys could reach 6.5 percent over the next several years. Syndicated loans used to finance the recent purchases of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Linens 'n Things and Freescale, a semiconductor maker, are trading at significant discounts only months after the deals were closed, after the companies reported disappointing earnings or cash flow. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported that after a period in which lenders were throwing money at leveraged buyouts with few if any conditions, several private-equity buyers are having more trouble financing their deals. Those include KKR's $26 billion acquisition of First Data and Texas Pacific's purchase of JVC, the struggling consumer electronics giant. It is impossible to predict when the magic moment will be reached and everyone finally realizes that the prices being paid for these companies, and the debt taken on to support the acquisitions, are unsustainable. When that happens, it won't be pretty. Across the board, stock prices and company valuations will fall. Banks will announce painful write-offs, some hedge funds will close their doors, and private-equity funds will report disappointing returns. Some companies will be forced into bankruptcy or restructuring. But the damage won't be limited to Wall Street and its investors. For if we've learned one thing in the past 20 years, it is that what happens on financial markets, in booms and in busts, can have a big impact on the rest of the economy. Without the billions of dollars flowing each year to financiers and corporate executives, there will be less money to trickle down to car salesmen, yacht makers, real estate agents, third-home builders and busboys at luxury resorts. Falling stock prices will cause companies to reduce their hiring and capital spending while governments will be forced to raise taxes or reduce services, as revenue from capital gains taxes declines. And the combination of reduced wealth and higher interest rates will finally cause consumers to pull back on their debt-financed consumption. It happened after the junk-bond and savings-and-loan collapses of the late 1980s. It happened after the tech and telecom bust of the late '90s. And it will happen this time. The recent decline in home prices and the meltdown in the market for subprime mortgages are the first signs that the air is coming out of the credit bubble. Already, those factors have shaved half a percentage point off the economic growth rate. And you can be sure that there will be a much larger impact on jobs and incomes from a broad decline in stock and bond prices, a sharp tightening of credit and the turmoil that both of those will create in the murky derivatives markets. Steven Pearlstein will host a Web discussion today at 11 a.m. at washingtonpost.com. He can be reached atpearlsteins@washpost.com. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/.../AR2007061201801.html The End Of Cheap Credit? By Robert J. Samuelson Wednesday, June 13, 2007; Page A21 The most important price in the American economy is not the price of oil, computer chips, wheat or cars. It's the price of money -- interest rates. When rates move, they ultimately affect the price of almost everything else. Which poses some intriguing questions. Is the era of low interest rates ending? If so, what's next? The answers will hover over the 2008 election. A shaky economy would help Democrats; a stronger economy, Republicans. The economic expansion, both in America and the rest of the world, has rested on a foundation of abundant credit. Low interest rates famously drove the housing boom. In the 1980s, mortgage interest rates averaged 10.9 percent; after inflation, the "real" rate was a hefty 7.2 percent. During the decade, home prices rose a meager 1 percent beyond overall inflation. Since then, mortgage rates have dropped sharply. From 2000 to 2006, they averaged 6.5 percent, and after inflation only 4.2 percent. Lower rates meant people could afford to pay more. The result: Existing-home prices rose 29 percent more than overall inflation from 2000 to 2006. (The figures are from a study by economists Jonas D.M. Fisher and Saad Quayyum of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.) It's not just real estate. Low interest rates have fueled the private equity bonanza. Private equity refers to investment funds that, borrowing massive amounts, buy all the stock of publicly traded companies. In 2006, private equity buyouts of U.S. firms totaled $375 billion; some well-known firms "taken private" included Univision (the Spanish language television network) and Harrah's (the casino company). Similarly, low rates enabled governments and companies in developing countries to borrow huge amounts. From 2005 to 2007, borrowing will total about $900 billion, reckons the Institute of International Finance. Russia, Turkey and South Korea are all big borrowers. But now rates are edging up. There are two ways that credit tightens -- that is, the price of money rises -- and we're seeing both. The first is that government central banks, such as the Federal Reserve in the United States, deliberately try to restrict the amount of new credit. The second is that private investors and lenders (collectively known as the market) become more stingy and risk-averse. They demand higher rates on bank loans, bonds and mortgages. Until last week, many economists and investors thought the Fed would cut rates this year. From June 2004 to June 2006, it had raised the federal funds rate from 1 percent to 5.25 percent. But the latest speech from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke changed views; Bernanke repeated earlier worries about inflation. Now, the consensus is that the Fed won't cut rates this year -- and maybe not next. Abroad, the European Central Bank raised its key rate from 3.75 percent to 4 percent. Even the People's Bank of China is tightening credit. What central banks do mainly affects rates on short-term loans of a year or less. (For example, rates on Fed funds involve overnight loans between banks.) But "the market" has recently raised long-term rates, too. In mid-March, 10-year U.S. Treasury bonds fetched about 4.5 percent; last week, the rates moved decisively above 5 percent. It's not entirely clear why. The higher rates usually spread to riskier corporate bonds and mortgages. As the price of money increases, borrowing and the economy might weaken. The deep slump in housing could worsen. We could also discover that the long period of cheap credit has left a nasty residue. In this view, bad loans were made as lenders flush with cash poured money into riskier bonds and loans for private equity firms, hedge funds and developing countries. So defaults and losses mount; in effect, the "subprime" mortgage losses of earlier this year are repeated on other types of credit. The stock market sags under the weight of higher rates and all the bad news (interest rate fears sent the market down sharply again yesterday; the Dow Jones industrial average is now 3.4 percent below its recent peak). But this grim fate is hardly preordained. Judged by historical standards, the increase in interest rates is modest and may reflect a strong economy as much as tighter credit. Indeed, credit is still ample, just less so than a few months ago. Aside from subprime mortgages, delinquencies on other bonds and loans remain low. Interest rate "spreads" -- the gap between rates on safe and risky loans -- also remain low. Government central banks are attempting to restrain economies enough to prevent higher inflation, though not so much as to cause a recession. It's a delicate maneuver. Perversely, worsening inflation could push interest rates higher as investors strive to recover the eroding value of their money. The drama is technical and mostly invisible. But the outcome will shape the 2008 economy -- and help determine the next president. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/.../AR2007061201671.html |